When a subject attempts to maintain fixation of a stationary object, he brings its retinal image to fall upon a very circumscribed portion of his retina. He can maintain the retinal image of the target object in this preferred position for relatively long periods of time - a minute or more. During this period, very small high (saccades) and low velocity (drifts) eye movements occur, some of which are corrective in the sense that they tend to return the retinal image of the fixated object to the preferred position. Others result from intrinsic instability in the oculomotor system: they are "noisy" in the sense that they allow the retinal image of the fixated object to move away from the preferred retinal locus. Experiments this past year imply that the correctiveness of saccades depends more on psychological than stimulus variables because: 1) subjects could make voluntary saccades as small as fixation saccades in the presence of a stationary target, 2) set influenced small step tracking, and 3) fixation stability was not affected when subjects fixated various positions within simple forms. These results suggest that the small saccades made during fixation are initially voluntary eye movements that form part of an overlearned motor pattern in the adult.